Whatever the long term implications, in the short term the freeing of Betancourt was clearly the masterstroke that Uribe needed to extricate himself from the most difficult period of his two consecutive presidencies. Despite being supported by 70 to 80 per cent of the population, until the dramatic rescue of Betancourt the Colombian head of state had been under attack from various quarters and all the signs pointed to a troubled end to his second presidency. Now, at least in the immediate future, Uribe’s popularity is likely to rise to unprecedented levels.

Not least amongst the president’s problems had been his battle with the former head of the country’s supreme sourt, César Julio Valencia, who accused him of political interference in the case against ex congressional president Mario Uribe, his cousin and long time close political advisor. The ex-legislator is in jail charged with having links to paramilitary groups. Worse still, this is far from being the only case of its kind. The president’s relative is just one of 33 national political representatives now remanded on similar charges; another 52 are under investigation for links to right wing armed groups. A third of the Colombian legislature is presently under investigation or already in jail. The majority are from parties allied with the government.

The Colombian leader has recently been making efforts to distance himself from his one time allies. Despite backing off from ‘empty chair’ proposals that would have punished parties and congressional deputies with links to paramilitarism and/or the drug trade, Uribe still has plans for political reform that will provide him with the ‘independent’ status that brought him to the forefront of Colombian politics.

More difficult are the declarations of ex congresswoman Yidis Medina. Medina has accused government members, including ex interior minister Sabas Pretelt, of having bought votes, including her own, in order to swing an extremely tight congressional vote in favour of a change in the constitution. The amendment allowed Uribe to run for the second presidential mandate that he is now exercising. Three people have already been arrested in the case, and Medina herself has been sentenced to 47 months house arrest by the supreme court. But despite being strongly implicated by the court’s judgment, the president is likely to escape censure as he can only be investigated and judged by Congress. Given the present balance of power, action appears extremely unlikely.

It is unclear what motivated Medina to denounce the president and his group, and then hand herself over to the police. Some of the president’s supporters are claiming that the jailed paramilitary leaders are responsible, seeking revenge for what they see as a betrayal of the conditions under which they turned themselves in. There may be something in this. Uribe is presently under investigation for links to paramilitary organisations after jailed paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso declared that a group of the right wing irregulars met in Uribe’s house to plan a massacre. He denies the charge, classifying it as ridiculous.

It is the type of response he has used before, in particular regarding reputed links to the now defunct drug lord, Pablo Escobar, and the equally defunct Medellin Cartel. According to the 2007 book, Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, written by television reporter and Escobar’s one time lover Virginia Vallejo, Colombia’s most famous drug trafficker once credited the then director of civil aviation with providing all the permits necessary for the private airstrip he used to ship his cocaine to the United States. The book is dreadful, but its incriminating statements led Uribe to accuse Gonzalo Guillén, correspondent of the US-based New Herald, of masterminding the publication. Guillén fled Colombia after receiving threats on his life. Vallejo is also in the United States.

The white knight

Most presidents would have withered in the presence of this welter of accusations, links and conjecture. But Uribe marches on, retaliating at every opportunity. The counter offensive has been dramatic: the ex president of the supreme court now finds himself on the wrong end of a judicial proceeding; the supreme court itself is accused of being compromised by links to paramilitaries; and 14 paramilitary leaders were arbitrarily extradited to the United States on charges of drug trafficking.

César Julio Valencia is keeping to himself these days, but the families of the victims of the paramilitaries have been vocal. They have been quick to condemn the extradition on the grounds that the truth about the paras and their activities will now never be known. The Colombian Commission of Jurists has also criticized the extradition, saying it shows the Colombian state ‘does not have the capacity or the will to carry out the investigation and trial of the serious crimes committed against humanity by these people’, while adding that ‘the extradition for drug offences could easily have been carried out after a judicial process in Colombia’. According to the Commission, over the past five years 3,500 killings and forced disappearances have been attributed to the paramilitary groups by victims’ families, making a mockery of the demobilisation process.

The Inter American Commission on Human Rights stated that the extraditions might also interfere with efforts to determine the links between US agents and the paramilitaries. Perhaps that’s the point. One judicially directed stone kills a number of different birds, above all the possibility that in Colombia one could sing, allowing damaging revelations to find their way into the press and further complicate the passage of the stalled Free Trade Agreement with the United States. And business is the president’s major ally.

The process in the United States is strictly drug related and while the Colombian authorities do claim that they will continue to work with the extradited men, there is little confidence that anything major will come of any future investigations. It would hardly be in the interests of the jailed men to incriminate themselves further. Whatever the outcome, the tumult over the paramilitaries and their influence has had major political consequences for some of the higher ranking players, but at the grass roots level it is life and death as normal for the paramilitaries and right wing squads. Not that it goes unnoticed. The Presidency of the European Commission recently took the unusual measure of publicly condemning the continuing pressure on human rights workers and social movement leaders in Colombia, five of whom have been killed in the space of a few weeks. It is a welcome move, but the European Union is a long way away.

Thank you neighbour

Ecuador and Venezuela are much closer. Maintaining a state of patriotic excitement over the two countries’ supposed ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has helped to shore up public support and dampen criticism. The major source of information for the accusations against Colombia’s two neighbours has been the computers, hard drives and USB devices that according to Colombian sources were found in the camp where FARC commander Raul Reyes was killed on 1 March.

On 15 May, Interpol presented its report on the computers. According to executive director Ronald Noble, no evidence was found of interference in the eight pieces of equipment (three computers, three USB devices, and two external disc drives) found after the raid on the camp established on the Ecuadorian side of the common border by Reyes and a group of FARC combatants.

No evidence was found, but as Poirot might say, lack of evidence is not proof of non intervention, simply proof of lack of evidence. Indeed, according to Interpol, the ‘Reyes’ computers, hard drives and USB devices were repeatedly interfered intervened between 1 March, when the raid took place, and 3 March, when the evidence was handed over to the Colombian Police for custody. In all, 273 system files were created, 373 user and system files opened, 786 system files changed and 488 files suppressed.

The veracity of the contents of the files is still open to debate. Points of view depend on politics and on the belief that it is impossible to alter a file without leaving a trace. As Interpol itself pointed out in the recommendations contained in its report: ‘Law enforcement alone will never be able to keep abreast of the fast pace of IT developments and changes.’

And talking of computers, it is worth mentioning that the laptop of one of the most important jailed paramilitary leaders, the previously mentioned Salvatore Mancuso, seems to have disappeared, along with the SIM cards of the mobile phones of other jailed leaders, at the moment they were extradited to the United States. Computers belonging to other men, permitted while they were in jail, could well have been intervened, admitted the Minister of the Interior.

Keeping the pot boiling

Nationally, the anti FARC campaign, both military and media, has also been paying political dividends in a big way. The major blows have been the deaths of Reyes and Ivan Ríos, two of the guerrilla’s high command, and the surrender of ‘Karina’, or Nelly Ávila, the leader of the FARC’s 47th front, who handed herself over on 18 May after almost 20 years of fighting and a reputation of being a ‘Rambo’ among revolutionary commanders. She has apparently recorded radio messages calling on her compañeros to lay down their arms.

The death of Manuel Marulanda (Pedro Antonio Marín) the group’s long time leader, has also had some impact on the FARC, but did not provide Uribe with more points. The revolutionaries stated that he died on 26 March from a heart attack at age 80; he had been reported as ill for some time and there are those who believe he died at least a year previously. Even so, the Colombian armed forces claimed that his death might have been due to a bombardment of his camp; they continue with their gruesome search for his grave. Opinion is divided about the new leader, Alfonso Cano, who may or may not be more open to dialogue. The real question is: with whom? Uribe is making overtures, but no one believes him, his consistent position has been to smash the FARC. Ex minister of the interior Carlos Holguín stated that if Cano doesn’t negotiate, ‘We will exterminate him.’

An interesting and perhaps revealing point related to Marulanda’s death is that rather than coming via the president, the information was initially provided by the magazine Semana, property of the family of defence minister Juán Manuel Santos. Santos’s star has been rising lately; Uribe was reportedly unhappy about the way the news was made public. The Betancourt affair has made Santos one of the most popular government figures, and he is reported to be a likely candidate in the next election. There have been other signs of fracture within the governing group too: the recent resignation of Carlos Holguin, who also plans to run for the presidency, and the support of Uribe allies in Congress (against the administration’s wishes) for legislation providing compensation for victims of the war, including those affected by government forces.

Looking for a legacy

Whatever the internal machinations of the Uribe team, the recent successes against the FARC, and in particular the bloodless release of Betancourt, have helped the Colombian leader maintain support and avoid the difficult questions. This is not to say the left is dormant. Opposition mayors hold power in the capital Bogotá and Medellín, cities with a combined population of some 12 million people. What the success of the Polo Democrático in Bogotá reveals is that, whatever their opinion of the president’s successes against the FARC, large numbers of people are unhappy with pro-US, free market, flexible labour policies, all instituted under cover of war. Unhappiness with Uribe does not, on the other hand, translate into support for the guerrillas the FARC probably has an approval rating of close to zero. The majority of Colombians simply want the war to be over, and don’t care how it happens.

The president’s popularity can also be explained by the recent strength of Colombian economy, but to a large degree this reflects an overall improvement in the region’s economic fortunes. In the context of a slowdown in the United States, the country will doubtless be vulnerable due to its dependence on exports to and investment from the northern giant.

Despite the vote buying scandal centred on the first re-election, government supporters have continued to collect the signatures needed for a referendum on a second. Until the Betancourt rescue, the chances seemed limited; even the church informally disapproved. Now the road seems open. As one commentator put it, the options are now either to remain in power or, after this term is over, to withdraw as the man who beat the guerrillas. Given Uribe’s track record, relinquishing power does not seem the more likely outcome.

In a recent interview with the Argentinean journalist Andres Oppenheimer, the Colombian head of state affirmed that he is president for a second time because he was reelected by some seven million four hundred thousand Colombians (from an electorate of 25 million). The implication is that if those same Colombians want him to serve a third term, then so be it. Even so, up to now Uribe has been playing coy, unwilling to publicly commit himself. The Ingrid effect has changed that.
Asked by Oppenheimer if altering the constitution once again to legitimise a third election was going down the same road as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who was roundly criticised internationally for aspiring to be ‘president for life’, the Colombian head of state responded that his aim was for Colombia to opt for ‘democratic security’, and that he was ‘promoting a form of thought that, God willing, in Colombia will provide many leaders and candidates for the presidency and that we will be able to elect many presidents’.

Advancing his thoughts on the politics of the right, Uribe, who in 2007 received the ‘Light Unto Nations’ award from the American Jewish Committee, has been promoting the creation of a force that will dominate politics in Colombia for 50 years.

North and South

The proposition may be somewhat optimistic. Alvaro Uribe may succeed in winning the right to a third term, but with two years to run, winning is not a sure thing. No matter how it was achieved, the Betancourt rescue was the ace up the sleeve; in the short term it got the Colombian strong man out of a nasty political mess. But the euphoria will not last for ever, and aces will be increasingly difficult to find. The war is not over, the FARC may be down but they are not out. Paramilitary violence is resurgent, forced displacements continue and the cocaine culture shows no sign of being eradicated. The Medina affair is bound to resurface, divisions and resentment with the governing camp will probably deepen, and other candidates are bound to show their hands. Capitalising on her present popularity, Ingrid Betancourt has herself been acting as a prospective candidate, already distancing herself from her rescuer.

Throughout his time as president Alvaro Uribe has made a habit of looking north, towards George Bush and the United States. It might be time to look south. In Lima, Perú, another fighter against guerrillas, ex Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who also tended to look north and who in his time enjoyed massive support, is presently on trial for human rights abuses. Fujimori broke the back of the MRTA and Sendero Luminoso and jailed its leader Abimael Guzmán; he was as popular as his Colombian counterpart and believed in his own invincibility. He changed the constitution, dismissed Congress, and votes were bought through his head of security Vladimir Montesinos, although Fujimori claimed he was unaware of the events. But in a bid for a third term he overstepped the line, fixed the election and was eventually forced out of power and into exile. Now back home, he is in jail not far from Guzmán and Montesinos.

There is war in the high Andes. There are no rockets, no suicide bombs, no bodies rotting on the streets. Up in the rarified mountain air of the Colombian and Ecuadorian capitals the weapons are different, but the aim is pretty much the same: control. This war between the two Andean nations is being fought out on the airwaves and in the pages of the press, with the United States present in every move.

The source of the conflict is Ecuador’s traditionally neutral stance vis-a-vis its neighbour’s seemingly never ending civil wars, its consistent refusal to categorise the leading Colombian insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as terrorists, and its determination to get rid of a US military base on its Pacific coast that has played a covert part in the Colombian armed conflict. To make things worse this particular Ecuadorian government has declared itself to be ‘socialist’ and has shown itself to be friendly towards Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

The troubles in Colombia have been a perennial thorn in the side of Ecuadorian politicians; the country has spent years debating its neighbour’s problems and trying to stave off the impacts they have brought in their wake, particularly since the initiation of Plan Colombia in 2000. But after the attack on its territory by Colombian forces on 1 March it seems that the Ecuadorian government and its policy of neutrality will be tested to the limit in the battle to force Ecuador to take sides: the side of the government of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Vélez.

Legitimate targets

Alvaro Uribe is likely to be one of the very few people in this world who will be sad to see the back of George W Bush. The collective sigh of relief that can be heard as the world watches the US presidential primaries, and imagines a world without one of the most warlike and intellectually challenged presidents in the history of the United States, is not audible in the corridors of the presidential palace in Bogotá. The Colombian head of state is desperate to finish off his adversaries and the next US leader may be less committed to military solutions.

But it’s not over yet. Bush was never going to be a traditional lame duck president – quite the opposite. So there will doubtless be a sting in the tail of this particularly nasty American administration. The seven months remaining still allow enough time for scores to be settled, and while the political and economic climate in the US may not be conducive to major operations such as an attack on Iran or Venezuela, the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador are clearly more appetising targets, vulnerable to means less dramatic than major military intervention.

The 1 March incursion into the northern Ecuadorian province of Sucumbios was the opening gambit. The Colombian minister of defence, Juán Manuel Santos, openly stated that he regretted nothing, claimed the raid was legitimate and a clear victory for his country despite its condemnation as a violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty by the Organisation of American States. Twenty-six people died. Among them was Raul Reyes, second in command of the FARC, four students from the Autonomous University of Mexico (DF) and one Ecuadorian citizen. But apart from the dead the attack has left behind a number of questions, above all regarding the participation of the United States.

AWAC electronic monitoring planes from the American base at Manta on the Ecuadorian coast are constantly in the air but failed to report the attack to the Ecuadorian authorities until it was over, despite having more than sufficient time to do so: the raid lasted six hours. Colombia also claims the encampment and the position of Reyes was revealed to them by human agents. But the heavy tree cover that made the camp invisible from the air, the fact that the raid was carried out at night, and the precision of the bombing, all suggest the use of sophisticated monitoring equipment used by AWAC type aircraft. The type of bombs used has also been analysed by the Ecuadorian military. Their conclusions are that the GBU 12 type of guided bomb was used in the raid, which according to NATO no planes used by the Colombian airforce are equipped to carry. The question of what planes were used, where they were based and who flew them, are presently being investigated by the Ecuadorian government.

An Ecuadorian military source, who asked not to be named, was quoted by the Inter Press Agency as saying that the pilots of the planes that attacked Ecuadorian territory were Americans, possibly employees of Dyncorp, a company which provides military equipment and mercenaries and has contracts related to Plan Colombia. The planes, said the source, flew from the US base at Tres Esquinas in the southern Colombian department of Caqueta.

Colombian authorities claim that Franklin Aisalla, the Ecuadorian who died in the attack, was a FARC sympathiser and therefore also a ‘legitimate target’ according to the Uribe government, despite being a non combatant and being on his home soil. The issue of ‘legitimate targets’ has been taken up by the New York faith-based Fellowship of Reconciliation. The group has been investigating the role of US aid to Colombian army units that kill their own civilians and claim them (at times going so far as dress them) as guerillas. Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have exposed the widespread nature of the practice.

According to the Post, a coalition of Human Rights Groups has claimed that a total of 955 civilians (campesinos) were executed in this way between mid 2002 and mid 2007. The killings appear to correspond to the need to boost numbers in the face of American pressure to be ‘winning’ the war against the guerilla forces and justify the huge expense involved in supporting Colombian military expansion. Together with Amnesty International, the Fellowship of Reconciliation is preparing a report, which will claim that the US has approved aid to certain Colombian military units ‘despite creditable allegations regarding killings disappearances and collaboration with outlawed paramilitary forces’.

Computer games

Since the 1 March raid the attempt to force a change in the political stance of Rafael Correa’s government has changed form. The confrontation is now being carried on in the leading newspapers and television station of the two countries and in the foreign press, mainly hostile to Ecuador and anything vaguely connected to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. The major play has revolved around the computer supposedly belonging to Raul Reyes that Colombian-US authorities maintain survived the bombardment. The Colombian-US position is that the device contained documents showing that the FARC had contributed to Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa’s electoral campaign and had received money from Hugo Chávez. A nice twist was provided by documents which allegedly showed Fernando Bustamente, the Ecuadorian minister of state, to be a CIA agent and his sub-secretary, Juán Sebastián Roldán, to be an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Agency, DEA.

In the unlikely event that a computer did survive, OAS president José Miguel Insulza has cast doubt on the ability of anyone (including Interpol, to whom the final proof of authenticity has been charged) to prove the files are real, or even if they were, to show that they represented the truth. The Colombian government has provided photocopies to the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian authorities. Both have rejected them as useless. But despite the lack of evidence that the documents are real the New York Times has joined the fray, carrying front-page allegations against the two governments.

A second incident involved the Bogotá daily El Tiempo. The newspaper, owned by the family of the vice president and minister of defence , printed a photograph said to have been found in Reyes’ computer which showed him in the company of a man the paper claimed was Gustavo Larrea, the Ecuadorian minister of internal and external security. The person in question was later shown to be an Argentinean unrelated to Larrea. But as with the raid and the supposed computer documents, the first strike is what counts. The supposed facts prepare the ground for a chain of events whose course later apologies or refutations cannot change.

In another example of erroneous reporting the Spanish daily El País (which has a long-running campaign against Hugo Chávez) ) claimed that according to an un-named OAS spokesperson the FARC had numerous camps on the Ecuadorian side, coming and going as they pleased. The OAS categorically denied that any of its personnel had made such statements, while the Ecuadorian military demonstrated that of the sites mentioned by El Pais two were actually in Colombia, while none at all could be located on Ecuadorian soil.

That the FARC come and go as they please on the Colombian side is undisputed: they simply control that part of the country. The Colombian army has only two posts on the entire length of the 364 kilometers of the common border, compared to eight of the FARC and ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional). The Colombian government accuses Ecuador of not controlling its side of the frontier, but apart from the difficulty of patrolling the entire border, particularly in the densely forested areas, the task is made so much more difficult by the fact that on the other side of the river it’s the FARC, not the Colombian government, that forms the political presence.

Regional newspapers now seem to be full of reports about the FARC: the death, capture or surrender of leading operatives and subordinates, some, such as Ivan Rios, allegedly killed by their own for the million dollar reward (the possibility exists that the killing was done by paramilitaries, which supposedly no longer operate); the uranium that belongs, or not depending on the source, to the FARC; the arrest of FARC members in Peru; the links between the FARC and the Brazilian mafia; the links between the FARC and Costa Rica etc etc etc.

Spent force

Over the years, and particularly in the period of the dictatorships in South America in the 1970s and 1980s, the FARC was seen by many Latin Americans as one of the few forces capable of withstanding the bloody right wing military agenda of the likes of General Pinochet in Chile and General Videla and the military junta in Argentina. As a guerilla force whose aims were to make Colombia more responsive to the needs of the poor, it counted on the moral and in many cases direct support of large numbers of people throughout the region, not to mention Colombia itself.

The FARC clearly use the drug trade to finance their activities. But they are not alone. Colombia is a complicated place and while it would probably be going too far to call it a narco- state, the history of Pablo Escobar (a friend and admirer of Alvaro Uribe), the Cali and Medellin cartels and the smaller siblings that now operate the trade, the drug linked paramilitary forces (which have not been demobilised but rather been reorganised in smaller, more private security type units ), as well as Alvaro Uribe himself (named by the US Department of Defense as No 82 on a list of important people linked to the cocaine trade ), show clearly that the drug trade is deeply embedded in Colombian society . Asking Ecuador to take sides based on involvement in the drug trade is not very practical.

According to some the FARC is demoralised, on the run, their troop levels fallen from 18,000 to between 6,000 and 12,000 and the war will soon be won. It’s hard to evaluate the claims as no definite information is available, but much of it seems to err on the side of wishful thinking, to be worked up to satisfy Colombian voters or American task masters, or is simply another aspect of the propaganda war. And while it does seem clear that the FARC are not the force they were ten years ago, they (and the ELN, the National Liberation Army) still control huge areas of land (an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the national territory) as well as more than 25 per cent of all municipalities. Barring a sudden collapse, for which there is no evidence, it seems unlikely that the conflict will end any time soon.

Give peace a chance

Ecuador has the sympathy and support of almost all Latin American countries for its sovereign position in the face of the Colombian attack on its territory. But in the end the country has been forced to re-examine its position vis-à-vis the conflict, and in one sense the Colombian/US strategy has worked. After the raid it no longer appears possible to believe that the consequences of the conflict can be wished away or limited to the other side of the rivers that mark the frontier between the two countries.

The impacts are dramatic. The hundreds of thousands of Colombian refugees that have poured into the country in the last five or six years , with little or no international help in dealing with their needs; the environmental and health impacts of spraying the herbicide glyphosate over large areas of the frontier region , carried out by the Colombian government to eradicate coca leaf but also to clear the frontier area and deny human support to the guerrillas; and finally the high cost ($100 million a year according to Ecuadorian military sources) of stationing troops to police a border the Colombians themselves are unable to control.

For a long time now the violence in Colombia has been out of control. The ninth of April of this year marked the 60th anniversary of the shooting of the Colombian Liberal leader Jorge Eliezer Gaitán in the centre of Bogotá. His death triggered a round of violence that has still not come to an end. What began as the Bogotazo, later became La Violencia, and was transformed into the insurrection of the Marxist guerillas, has now been incorporated into the War on Terror in another attempt by one side to defeat the other. But whatever the name, no matter the definition, the bloodshed is a constant .

In the end what is important is that no country, no population, no civil society ought to be subjected to 60 years of war, and that no neighbouring country should be subject to the impacts of that violence. Colombians and Ecuadorians have many things in common, but above all they both need an end to the constant death, destruction and forced migration. Both nations need to be able to spend their resources in meeting social goals, in improving the lives of their populations, large numbers of whom exist in dire poverty. In the end the only answer is peace. The difficulty is how to find the road. In this sense the end of the bitter long-running conflict in Northern Ireland and the peaceful (although admittedly fragile) conclusion to the Balkan conflict, offers some hope that it can be done. In the Colombian case Ecuador will need to stay neutral but work hard for peace; it is the only ethical response to the media war being waged against it and to the real needs of both nations.

Ecuador needs to mobilise international pressure from other South American states, in particular Brazil, in order to develop a true peace process (as opposed to the slaughter that resulted from the last real attempt ) in which all are guaranteed security.

There are a number of obstacles. Conflict always benefits someone, and on the Colombian side the civil war has been a boon to the neoliberals and the economic elites. On the Ecuadorian side, despite being the injured party Rafael Correa has surely noticed that his popularity has risen since the beginning of what the local press has called ‘microphone diplomacy’. Also of concern is the fate of Evo Morales in Bolivia, if he falls or even fails, it will likely convince many that the electoral road has been closed off, and that arms are once again the only solution.

Finally, but by no means least important, are the various interests of the United States. Besides being a boon for the US arms industry, the Colombian conflict, as with the Korean War, has provided the motive for the militarisation and the consequent, and very large, strategic US presence. Peace would remove that rationale, and for the US this may simply not be part of the plan.

Footnotes

· The Crisis Group, an NGO linked to the World Bank, has recently estimated that after falling for a number of years, the production of Coca leaf and Cocaine actually increased by 8% with a greater area under production now than in 1995. (‘Colombia No Logra Cotrolar el Narcotráfico’. El Comercio, Quito, 7 April 2008)

· The Ecuadorian Government and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimate that there are some 250,000 refugees in Ecuador plus another 40,000 that have been granted status. According to the Jesuit Refugee Service in Quito the figure is much higher, of some 750,000 Colombians in the country only 80,000 have status while the rest are refugees or people displaced by the Colombian conflict. (‘ONG: más de 600,000 desplazados en Ecuador’. El Comercio, Quito, 13 March 2008)

· Spraying takes place in Colombia but the proximity to the border and the height of the spraying has mean that severe health impacts have been felt within a ten kilometer range of Colombia. Chromosomal damage and other major health impacts have been identified in frontier populations together with contamination of water, animals and crops. El Sistema de Aspersiones Aéreas del Plan Colombia y su Impactos Sobre el Ecosistema y la Salud en La Frontera Ecuatoriana. Comisión Científica Ecuatoriana, Dr. Jaime Brielh et al. Quito 2007. The Ecuadorian government has recently launched a suite against Colombia at the World Court in the Hague over the impacts of the spraying. The case is expected to last up to six years.

· It is difficult to calculate the number of deaths related to the violence since 1948. Figures of 200,000 and even 300,000 have been quoted for the number of people killed from 1948 to 1956 but that figure is undoubtedly imprecise. Figures from 1964 onwards also vary. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that from 163 to 2000, 47,000 people died as a direct consequence of the violence, while Amnesty International estimates that 60,000 people died in the much shorter period from 1985 to 2002.

· In 1984 a ‘Bilateral Cease Fire’ was signed between Manuel Marulanda of the FARC and Colombian President Belisario Betancourt. A legally recognized political party the Union Patriotica, UP, was formed in exchange for a progressive reduction in military activity by the FARC. But after the UP won a third of the votes in municipal elections a campaign of violence against its leaders was begun. Thousands of its supporters were killed, including three presidential candidates.

· Colombia now has the highest troop levels of any country in South America (210,000 not including air-force, navy or police dedicated to anti guerrilla activities), and spends 6.5% of its GDP on the military, the US 4% even with the war in Iraq. (See ‘Crisis en la región: La guerra preventiva de Bush llegó a Sudamérica’, Raúl Zibechi, IPS, 7 March 2008)

There is no argument about the importance of the USA. Both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europeans ignore developments there at their own risk, a fact reflected by the amount of media space and correspondent time devoted to the coverage of the United States and its internal and external policies. The real problem is that the rest of the continent, the bits that stretch from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego (not to mention Canada ), appears to have slipped back into the fog from which they emerged, and entered European consciousness, on the day Columbus blundered into the Caribbean.

There has always been some interest in events in Latin America and the Caribbean. The sugar, coffee, and cocoa trade meant that colonial administrators and those with ‘interests’ in the region paid attention to what went on there. That continues. The fullest sources of information in Britain about countries such as Brazil, Argentina or Mexico are publications such as the Financial Times and the Economist, whose readers are more likely to have economic interests in the region.

For readers of the non-financial press, the assumed irrelevance amounts to a news black-out. The Middle East is news, because apart from the humanitarian and social justice concerns, we must perhaps bear some of the historical blame for the carnage and oppression that takes place there. Asia is acknowledged: China and its impact on the global economy can no longer be ignored. But now at least, the press assures us, if the ‘yellow peril’ does materialize, it will be of an acceptable capitalist persuasion. Africa also occupies our attention, again for humanitarian reasons, but also, perhaps, because we and other European powers suffer from a form of post-colonial hangover.

Latin America may feature in the news agendas of the USA, and perhaps Spain and Portugal . But in Britain , and the Andean or Central American countries could easily form a chapter of the Channel 4 series ‘What We Still Don’t Know’. When Latin American issues are covered, reports often bear the mark of fillers and the intellectual level of some pieces is poor. And, of course, there is the issue of political bias. The market coloured glasses of the Economist and Financial Times are obvious.

What is perhaps not so clear, and therefore more problematic, is the perspective of two more ‘progressive’ dailies, the Guardian and the Independent . The papers have no regional staff correspondents. They rely on stringers and agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press (the more progressive Inter Press Service, IPS, isn’t on their list) and copy could be described, generously, as middle of the road: a recent article in the Guardian concerning the de-commissioning of paramilitary fighters in Colombia failed to mention that the ‘Paras’ have been accused of links with the army and the President. The headline of another piece in the same paper in May could even be considered sickly humorous. It read, ‘Chavéz: left-wing dictator or saviour of the poor?’ We can only wonder if this gem would have been published if the subject had been, George W.Bush: right wing dictator or saviour of the rich?

On a more positive note, the BBC, to its credit, does make news available on its web site that in many cases does not appear in the dailies. For instance, there was coverage of the attempted re-trial of Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas in Lima , Peru . But the coverage is still mainstream and First-Worldist. In one report on the Guzmán trial, the BBC writer described some Peruvian journalists as being “as respectful as a bunch of hungry hyenas who have just stumbled on a dead zebra”. While the mainly tabloid Lima press is rightly famous for its blood and sex journalism (deftly portrayed in the Film ‘Tinta Roja’), it is hard to understand the incredulity of a reporter surely not unaware of the table manners of some of the British tabloid press.

The other problem with the BBC web page is that, in terms of reaching a new public, the Internet is used mainly by those already interested in a particular topic. And while the coverage is better, it is still not brilliant. A search of its Americas news site reveals that in the last six months Luiz ‘Lula’ da Silva, President of Brazil, was mentioned only ten times, about the same number as his Peruvian counterpart, Alejandro Toledo. They both fared better than the President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, with seven mentions, or Lucio Guttierrez of Ecuador , with only two. For non-official political figures such as the Bolivian indigenous leader Evo Morales, or Subcomandante Marcos of Chiapas , Mexico , the situation is much worse: they didn’t manage a single mention between them.

The most likely explanation for this silence is the acceptance of an informational Monroe Doctrine, a doctrine drafted by John Quincy Adams and put forward by US President Monroe (1817-1825) declaring the American continent to be off-limits to European interests (leaving Africa to Europe). But in an interconnected age in which financial upheavals can cause major impacts on the other side of the globe, where global warming and the social consequences of global ‘free trade’ are major inter-related problems, and poverty is not confined to Asia and Africa, the failure to provide in-depth coverage of Latin America and its over 500 million inhabitants is a disservice to everyone.

In Britain we need to understand more of the civil war in Colombia, the Bush-Chavez battle over Venezuela, the Argentinean battle with the International Monetary Fund, the struggle for a separate indigenous state in Bolivia, and the economic and political contradictions of a Brazil governed by a man whose presidential juggling act reminds one of Tony Blair, despite his solid labour background. Brazil , Venezuela and Bolivia may be half a world away, just like the United States , but that’s no reason to ignore them. Their issues are also ours.

Gerard Coffey, Director of the Ecuadorian bi-monthly, Tintají